Stanford CIS
Yana Welinder

Yana Welinder

Non-Residential Fellow

Yana is CEO and Co-Founder of Kraftful, where she’s working to make smart home technology accessible to many more people. Before starting Kraftful, she headed up the product management team at IFTTT helping people to unlock magical experiences by connecting their different products.

In previous roles, Yana worked on disrupting manufacturing with digital production at Carbon and tackled free knowledge creation on Wikipedia. She also co-created CollabMark, an open source and free culture brand guide, which has been adopted by Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, and Node.js.

Before transitioning into product, Yana was an interdisciplinary tech law professor, thinking about how intuitive design can replace legalese to provide meaningful transparency to users of technology. She then kept a foot in academia through scholarship and affiliations with Stanford CIS and Berkman Center @ Harvard.

As a tech policy thought leader, she’s published pieces in the New York Times, the Harvard Journal of Law & Tech, and a chapter in the Cambridge Handbook of Consumer Privacy.

Yana holds an LL.M. from Harvard Law School, a J.D. from University of Southern California, and an LL.B. from the London School of Economics and Political Science.

Recent articles

Blog

Hacking Trademarks for Free Culture

Open source software projects and other collaborative communities are built on the principle that information should be shared and remixed. Some of these projec…

Blog

Free as in Open Access and Wikipedia

Cross-posted from EFF. Between October 20 and 26, EFF is celebrating Open Access Week alongside dozens of organizations from around the world. This is a week t…